Natural Capitalism

"Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution , which Amory Lovins wrote with Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken. This was a huge inspiration for Thomas Friedman’s recent book, Hot Flat And Crowded , and talks about social economics and bureaucratic systems and how we need to re-engineer them completely for the 21st century. Amory Lovins is approaching this problem set as one which is primarily environmental, addressing the need to take care of scarce resources on the planet and suggesting how we might reconfigure our systems with that goal in mind. Ashraf Ghani and I learned a lot from Lovins and applied what we had learned in the context of national stability when we were writing Fixing Failed States."

"This came out in 1994, and was the first book to say that if we get smart about redesigning capitalism then there is no reason why capitalism shouldn’t thrive alongside sustainability. Hawken was a businessman who turned all his business acumen to the issue of sustainability to see how the capitalist economy can create a more sustainable world. This book was very controversial at the time because a lot of environmentalists argued at that time that capitalism could never survive in the sustainable world. Hawken said: ‘Don’t trash it: redesign it.’ Forum for the Future works with governments and companies to work on that reconciliation between making money and sustainability."

"The last century resolved a fairly big question, which was are we going to have free markets, or are we going to have statist regimes dominating the human family? That question has been asked and answered. The question now is not whether capitalism but what kind of capitalism . That is still up for debate, and should be debated quite vigorously. Are we going to have the kind of capitalism that concentrates wealth in the hands of the few, that winks and nods at monopolistic abuses of the free-market system but doesn’t actually challenge them, the kind of capitalism which is not productive – basically banker capitalism, gambling, casino capitalism? Is that what we want? Do we want a capitalism that’s going to make life on earth impossible for most humans? Probably not. On the other hand, do we want the kind of capitalism where we unleash entrepreneurship and innovation to solve some of the toughest problems, actually create pathways out of poverty for billions of people, and begin to create a quality of life that’s not dependent on massive destruction of large quantities of resources? There are two capitalisms out there, a grey capitalism and a green capitalism, and I think that’s the big fight. One of the reasons why I think some of the opponents of the president want to associate a more vigorous and dynamic kind of capitalism – green capitalism – with the old failed socialist stuff of the past is that they don’t want to have this argument. They want to act like there’s only one kind of capitalism, and that’s casino capitalism with bad wages and a lot of pollution for our children. And that’s not true. That’s not the only capitalist future available. This book is the best combination of deep poetry and high theory that I’ve come across in the literature, and it’s a very close expression of my own views. I’m pretty simple about this stuff. I just believe the pledge of allegiance says liberty and justice for all. Liberty, property rights, we’re all for that. Nobody in America, no matter how liberal they might be, is going to move to North Korea or Cuba. We like it here. We like all these freedoms, we like our iPads, so we’re not moving. Liberty is property rights and justice, human rights – we’re for that too. Everything which is equality, we’re for that. So the full set of American values requires a dynamic balance, and the genius of America is that we are passionately committed to a whole lot of values that don’t go together. The fact that we make it work day after day, year after year, century after century, is a part of this miracle of what we are. That’s why America is the best idea in the world and the best idea in the history of the world. What we always have to watch out for are those people who reduce America to a single value. Those are the dangerous people. The people who want to say America can only be described, categorised and celebrated for our extraordinary economic performance. That’s true, but we aren’t just our economic performance. We are also an extraordinary country because of our high environmental performance (and standards there could be improved), our high commitment to labour standards, and our higher commitment to consumer protection. If you want to live in a country where the only thing they care about is economic performance, you can go live in a country like that. Your kids will drink poisoned water, they’ll play with toys that kill them, you’ll work for pennies a day, you can be fired for any reason at all. There are countries like that. But that’s not the United States of America. You’re not going to make – and we can’t let – people turn America into one of those countries, because the reason that we’re the light of the world and a beacon to so many people is because we’ve been able to be excellent across a range of categories, vindicating a range of values at the same time. Even values that don’t go together. How do you respect the earth, make some money, and upgrade and improve our system through the new century? What I love about Natural Capitalism is it takes on that challenge."